Because our middle level learners are ready for more independence, age-appropriate challenges, and they crave mastery of skills, we need to teach them differently. Middle level learners need to spend less time memorizing content and more time developing skills. They need to imagine more, choose more, produce more so that they like school more. A skill-centered curriculum, using content as a vehicle for skill development, is the future of middle level education.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

In this time of abundant school redesign, many of us are
thinking about the ideals of student experience and how those might be made
manifest in our existing schools or those we could start from scratch. For
those of us with a progressive bent, the tenets of the student-centered
classroom are an anchor to this. While this has spatial design and
student-teacher ratio ramifications, we need to also think about the redesign
of the teacher experience.If we want to
have authentically student-centered classrooms, we need to reconceive our
school cultures in relation to what the job of teacher means to those who are
filling it.

Student-centered classrooms are predicated on the philosophy
that skills are best developed and knowledge best obtained when students are
designing and producing products that require they show mastery of content and
skills. This is an active paradigm- contructivism- which prizes collaboration,
problem-solving, creativity, and application. Educators who have begun to fully
actualize this model’s potential report unparalleled student-buy in and skill
development and the evolution of a classroom culture that genuinely celebrates
collaboration and independent thinking. Imagine how energizing and gratifying teaching
would be if the same were asked of the educators? What if our schools could
take their fundamental organizing cue from the culture of student-centered classrooms
and were reconceived to be “teacher-centered” schools?

Let’s use project-based learning as the analogue to help us
imagine how the teacher-centered school would function. PBL has four central
tenants: student-choice is important; products must have a practical
application; considerable programming time is devoted to individual or small group
working time; and there is a facilitating presence which is supportive and
evaluative. If you have taught in this way, you know well its power for
creating student-buy in, skill development, and ultimately, community. You also
know just how difficult it is to effectively orchestrate. And, you know how
profoundly gratifying it is to see students engaged in the process of
envisioning, creating, refining, and presenting their products for your
summative assessments.

In the teacher-centered school, the daily classroom
“teaching” is the summative assessment; that is when the fruits of the
individual or group labor are made public, thus useful. What happens leading up
to that is what makes the teacher-centered school so radically different: it
dramatically increases the amount of teacher working time devoted to program
development- and has administrators who are devoted to active facilitation of
teacher collaboration and program design. The teacher-centered school assumes
that teachers will be better at their jobs if they are endeavoring to produce
content in a way that honors their intelligence, their drive to succeed, and
their creative powers.

And because the teacher-centered school sees deep teacher
success as the key to its viability- that is, the key to its delivery of deep
student learning- it prioritizes the structured time needed for those endeavors.
It’s not an add-on- it’s an integral component. It becomes part of the working
day and the school year, and teachers are paid accordingly. This means that
teachers have their “planning periods,” but are also meeting collaboratively
after school, and that pre- and post-planning times in the summer are substantially
expanded. They are working more hours, thus they would get paid more.What creative, energetic educator would not
sign up for that?

Could this be a paradigm for our future schools? Its’ power,
in part, is that it elevates teaching and it would draw more of the creative
class into the field. Most importantly, however, is that it would be one of the
lynch-pins in creating the type of curriculum which will truly deliver the
skill development and life-long learning that progressive school reformers
value. Think about it, if you could start from scratch, wouldn’t you want to
build a teacher-centered school?

Thursday, March 14, 2013

We need to
continue to refine our understanding of what form of education best serves
children ages 10-14. Exciting work is being done on this front, but the scale
of our misunderstanding of the task is belied by the nomenclature we use to
label the schools that serve the group. Until we move away from the term
“middle school,” students ages 10-14 will continue to experience a curriculum
which is not truly for them.

Middle
school used to be called junior high school, but that name fell out of favor as
new understanding of the age group’s developmental realities suggested that
there was more to its members than being just smaller versions of high
schoolers. This was certainly a positive step in the evolution of the education
of this age group. I would suggest, however, that the qualifier “middle”
continues to suggest a limiting paradigm about their nature. “Middle” denotes
an existence relative to two end members, an thereby connotes relative insignificance.
That paradigm reveals the purgatorial state of the default educational
philosophy for this age group: its need only be transitional, a bridge from the
concrete years of elementary school to the elevated thought processes of high
school.Thus, we need only gradationally
reform those sheltered, concrete thinkers into the schedule tolerant,
information processors they will spend the last 4 years of their pre-college
education being. As long as middle school remains defined by its adjacents- and
charged with the task of serving them- we will continue to mis-educate the age
group and neglect its most valuable attributes. As long as transition defines
the curriculum, the specialness of the age group will not be honored. It's time
for the developmental realities of the age group to drive the middle school
curriculum.

I would
suggest a new fundamental pedagogical paradigm for educating the age group. The
result would be a 4 year program of spiraling skill development which brought
students to a pinnacle state at age 14 that allowed them to really soak up the new skills and content
offered in the secondary setting. This paradigm acknowledges that information
retention is not a primary strength of the age group, but that collaboration,
creative expression, boundary pushing, and content production are. With a goal
of launching them into the next stage with maximum curiosity, self-confidence,
affinity for institutions, and attachment to community, the new curriculum
would be entirely skill driven. Content would matter only because it was an effective
medium for skill development. Assessment would be practical: it would show
skills being practiced. Knowledge attainment would only be contructivist.
Teachers would be facilitators of skill absorption and monitors of student
progress on the spiral. The daily experience would be meaningful to the
individual students’ developmental realities. The curriculum would be driven by
where the children are right then, not some distinctly foreign things they are
in between.

When we
commit to meeting our 10-14 year-olds where they are and to offer them the opportunity
to daily practice the skills they are naturally developing, we will cultivate a
culture of learners who want to embrace the challenges of the world they are
growing into. Refining the label we place on the schools for that age child will come hand-in-hand with refining the attitude we take towards their educational experience. If we give them something that feels right to them, we ought to name it something that honors them What a nice gift for them- and for all of us who will come in
contact with them.